Qu’est-ce qu’un vibe coder ?

A vibe coder is someone who builds software by describing what they want in natural language and letting an AI tool write the code, rather than writing every line by hand. The term covers a wide range of people, from complete non-programmers building their first website to professional engineers using AI to speed up prototyping.

Vibe coder means a person who codes by feel and by prompt: they describe the outcome they want, accept most of what the AI generates, and iterate by describing changes rather than editing code directly. The word comes from vibe coding, the practice itself.

It depends on what you're building and how carefully you review the output. Vibe coding is a reasonable way to build a marketing site, a prototype, or an internal tool quickly, but shipping AI-written code that handles payments, authentication, or personal data without review carries real security and quality risk.

It spread fast because it named a habit that already had no name: describing an outcome and accepting AI-written code without checking every line, something a lot of people building with AI tools were already doing. Andrej Karpathy's February 2025 post is where the specific phrase "vibe coding" comes from, built around going with the feel of a solution instead of specifying every detail upfront.

Common scenarios include an indie hacker shipping a weekend side project without writing code by hand, a non-technical founder building their first landing page or small business site by describing it to an AI, a professional engineer using it to scaffold a prototype quickly before writing the production version themselves, and a student building a small personal tool or class project. The common thread is prompting for an outcome rather than writing the implementation directly.

A traditional developer typically writes and reviews code directly and is expected to understand what every line does. A vibe coder directs an AI tool toward an outcome and may not read or fully understand the generated code, which makes vibe coding faster to start but riskier for anything that needs careful review, like security-sensitive features.

There's no single best tool; it depends on what you're building. Kleap, Lovable, Replit, bolt.new, v0, Base44, and Emergent are prompt-first builders aimed at generating a working app or website, while Cursor and Windsurf are AI-native code editors built for people who still write and review code alongside the AI.